No one is falling over themselves to respond to US President Barack Obama’s quest for a new “coalition of the willing” to attack the jihadis of the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria — least of all, it seems, the Arab governments that are most immediately threatened by its brutal agenda.
The dangers are not in doubt: Jordan has been suffering the jitters since fighters from Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, took Mosul, Iraq, in June.
The Saudi authorities have rounded up “sleeper cells” said to be recruiting terrorists. The normally taciturn Saudis have been vocal in denying they support or finance IS, and insist they abhor its extremist and revolutionary ideology — even though their own penchant for beheadings is often cited by critics as one unpleasant likeness.
Elsewhere in the Gulf, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has made clear it considers Islamists of all hues a threat, at home and abroad. Even Kuwait, probably the biggest single source of private funding for extremists fighting in Syria, has cracked down. It and other states that looked the other way when their citizens funded jihad against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are now cooperating with the US Department of the Treasury.
The Gulf’s limitless financial resources alone were never enough to guarantee a coherent effort in the war against al-Assad.
Former Saudi Intelligence Agency director-general Bandar Bin Sultan, the last Saudi intelligence chief, was adept at delivering cash to rebel groups, but there was too much competition and not enough strategy and control.
The problem with the Saudis and Qataris’ effort, says Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, was that it did not have an equivalent of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, which ran the mujahidin war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Gulf sheikhs were no match for Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, determined to defend their ally in Damascus.
Conventional military capacity, especially in the air, is not a problem. The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have hundreds of advanced combat aircraft. However, problems of command and coordination persist.
“It is hard to see how the UAE Air Force or any Gulf Cooperation Council air force could provide any real firepower complement to US airstrikes beyond the symbolic legitimacy of an Arab state participating,” said Fredric Wehrey, of the Carnegie Foundation.
The case for action against IS is that the Sunni states have a responsibility to help defeat a group that has a warped sense of its own legitimacy and has behaved with such cruelty that it has been dubbed “al-Qaeda on steroids.”
However, there are reasons for reticence, too. The growth of sectarianism, linked to the strategic confrontation between the Saudis and Iran, has fed an already strong sense of Sunni solidarity: thus Gulf fury at the Shiite-dominated government of former Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, which did so much to promote an anti-Sunni agenda.
The hope is that the new Baghdad government, headed by Iraqi prime minister designate Haider al-Abadi, will prove more consensual.
“Each of these states, whether they like it or not, is bound to Iraq and Syria’s warring factions by tribal links, religion and history,” Wehrey said. “Their rulers are still sensitive to public opinion and especially the pockets of pro-IS sympathy among certain segments, some of them wealthy and influential.”
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